Toward the end of the seventeenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe recalls his discovery of the works of the humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523):“Die Werke Ulrichs von Hutten kamen mir in die Hände und es schien wundersam genug daß in unsern neuern Tagen sich das Ähnliche, was dort hervorgetreten, hier sich gleichfalls wieder zu manifestieren schien” (FA 14:773). This remark is followed by a long quotation from Hutten’s autobiographical letter to the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530). In the cited part of the letter, Hutten expresses the desire to be ennobled on his own merit and criticizes...

Goethe’s twenty-six year tenure as director of the Weimar Theater gives little indication of an interest in improvisational acting. In 1803 he composed a comprehensive list of rules for the aspiring actor which includes guidelines for pronunciation, rhythmic delivery, posture, hand positions, costumes and almost everything else imaginable.¹ This “narrow corset”² with which Goethe girded the actors under his purview is a far cry from the improvisational acting popular in Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century, before the onset of the theatrical reform spearheaded by Johann Christoph Gottsched and others.³ Given Goethe’s programmatic attention to detail as theater...

His scientific pursuits and writings have merited Goethe a place in histories of science in the eighteenth century,¹ and there is a great body of scholarship that documents his work in various scientific fields.² Recent studies, part of a wider reevaluation of the development of science in Europe in the eighteenth century,³ have greatly assisted our understanding of the intellectual and sociological milieu in which Goethe’s scientific pursuits took place and have largely erased the image of Goethe as a dilettante. Alongside studies of contemporary science in his various poetic works⁴ are those investigating the conceptual basis of Goethe’s scientific...

Well before photography and electronic networks encircled the planet, there existed a European migratory channel within which architectural images were carried across the Alps by tourists and pilgrims.¹ Moving along well-established pathways, architectural drawings, treatises, and personal recollections operated as a self-replicating network that allowed travelers, once home, to recreate the buildings they so admired abroad. The northern European reception of Andrea Palladio (1508–80), facilitated by the elegant woodcuts and explanations of his Quattro Libri dell’architettura (1570) [Four Books on Architecture] and by the prominence of his buildings in cities and estates between Vicenza and Venice, demonstrates the effectiveness...

“German poetry,” says Friedrich Kittler,“begins with a sigh.” Ach, the signifier of ineffability at the center of the German word for language (Sprache), launches, in this case, the spate of elegiac production most closely associated with Goethe’s classical lyric.

Ach! unaufhaltsam strebet das Schiff mit jedem Momente Durch die schäumende Flut weiter und weiter hinaus! Langhin furcht sich die Gleise des Kiels, worin die Delphine Springend folgen, als flöh’ ihnen die Beute davon. Alles deutet auf glückliche Fahrt: der ruhige Bootsmann Ruckt am Segel gelind, das sich für alle bemüht; Vorwärts dringt der Schiffenden Geist, wie Flaggen und Wimpel; Einer...

In the tenth chapter of the second part of Die Wahlverwandtschaften Goethe inserts the novella “Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder,”¹ an intriguing puzzle whose solution elucidates his moral and lends added unity to the work Thomas Mann deems “de[n] kühnsten und tiefsten Ehebruchsroma[n], den die moralische Kultur des Abendlandes hervorgebracht hat.”² The novella must be considered a puzzle, for although Goethe provides information throughout the novel that reveals the identity of the young officer of the insert, the character of the novel whose past presages the future of the other three principals, he challenges the reader to deduce the outcome of the...

Why did goethe marry Christiane Vulpius, his companion of eighteen years, on 19 October 1806, five days after Napoleon’s victory over Prussia at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt? The act perplexed Weimar gossips at the time, angering some, and Goethe’s motives for suddenly marrying then have been much discussed since.¹

After the wedding, a legend rapidly jelled: that the poet had married Christiane primarily out of gratitude, to thank her for her valiant defense of his person and home from the French soldiery plundering Weimar on the “schreckliche Nacht”² of 14 October. One report, by the Jena anatomist J. C. Loder,...

Man hat merhrmals versucht den ganzen Gedichtzyklus Urworte. Orphisch im Sinne des Metamorphose-Gedankens und des dialektischen Polaritäs- Denkens Goethes zu verstehen. “Der Zyklus”—so Theo Buck—“fügt sich organisch in die langjährigen Bemühungen Goethes um die Erkenntnis der Lebensgesetzlichkeit in Gestalt von ‘Urpflanze’ und ‘Urphänomen’ ein. So erklärt sich auch die auf den ersten Blick überraschende Erstveröffentlichung der Urworte. Orphisch in der vom Verfasser selbst herausgegebenen Zeitschrift Zur Morphologie (1820).”¹ Dass Theo Buck von dieser Auffassung her auch der Meinung ist, dem “zyklischen Gesamtbau”der Urworte liege “die dialektische Konzeption”² der morphologischen Steigerung zugrunde, ist zwar folgerichtig, aber—wie wir sehen...

There have been many excellent interpretations of Schiller’s Die Räuber, beginning with Benno von Wiese’s chapter in his Schiller¹ up to the 1998 essay by Hans-Richard Brittnacher.² Jaimey Fisher in an article published in the Goethe Yearbook in 2003 raises several issues that relate to my reading of the play. I will address these issues below. In general I agree with Karl S. Guthke’s assessment of Karl Moor as being driven by what the other robbers call “Groβ-Mann-Sucht” (titanic ambition), that the negative aspects of his character prevail over the positive ones, and that his final sacrifice does not redeem...

Numerous critics have pointed out that with the exception of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, the protagonists of his classical dramas die at the end: Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Joan of Arc, and Don Manuel and Don Cesar, the two enemy brothers in Die Braut von Messina.¹ If we associate Schiller with Romanticism, as Anglo-American criticism has done, this emphasis can be interpreted as part of the Romantic longing for death that we find in the works of his contemporaries from Novalis to Hölderlin.² But if we classify Schiller as a representative of German Classicism, it is difficult to find an explanation for...

Recent historical research has placed considerable emphasis on the redefinition of masculinity around 1800. Scholars have rightly pointed to the French Revolution as a major event in the transformation of masculinity, an event that left its mark not only on France but also on other parts of Continental Europe.¹ In the German countries, changes began to emerge during the 1780s, especially in the field of education; yet, it is only after the devastating Prussian defeat of 1806 that the question of masculinity receives official attention. For the Prussian reformers, the debacle of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstedt represented...